Good and Evil: More Than Meets the Eye

Last weekend was the fantastic nerd-gasm called Anime Expo. We dressed up, took a lot of pictures, bought things, watched animes, and generally geeked out. I personally laid down $100 on a Master’s Edition Megatron Transformer to go with our Optimus Prime.

After the initial enthusiasm wore off, I began reminiscing about the old Transformers show, and an interesting revelation came to me.

In my early years, the television shows I watched were of the same sort of soft-soap drivel that kids tend to be made to watch, simplistic and easy; morals without dilemma, synthetic character growth, easy resolution to conflicts (if any). The problem with these sorts of shows, I realized, was the unrealistic approach taken towards good and evil. In these shows, the “bad” characters oppose the good characters, as proper antagonists should, but all too often they were merely inverted mirror-images of the “good” characters. They delighted in doing “bad” (not even really “evil”) in almost the same way that the heroes delighted in doing “good”: not for any other reason, but merely as an end in itself. The formula “good guys like good because they’re good and bad guys like bad because they’re bad” proved, in the final analysis, to be wrong, and it is a misconception which many people are still unclear about.
Transformers, I now realize, was my first foray into a fuller understanding of the Good/Evil dichotomy.

Let’s start with Optimus Prime, noble leader of the Heroic Autobots. He is, of course, personified form of the true hero and leader, from his red-white-and-blue paintjob to strong moral and ethical code. However, if one looks at Prime’s relationship to the Autobots he leads, I find that the defining characteristic is that of love. Now, it’s not ever quite stated in straight-forward, sappy terms like that, but after watching/reading the old stories with older eyes, this becomes apparent. Prime’s altruism flows from his love of living things, and thence his love for his troops and for the Earthlings they protect. He would (and has) sacrificed himself (on numerous occasions) for the good of those around him, to protect, to serve, out of love, and with no thought to his own wellbeing. Consequently, the love is returned to him by his followers, and this is the basis for why Prime commands so much loyalty. I mean, who wouldn’t follow someone like Prime?

This benevolent and Christ-like leader, however, only takes us so far; it is when we move sides to the opposing camp that the real insights begin to come.

Meet Megatron, diabolical leader of the Evil Deceptions. Now, the Decepticons are not your typical rag-tag group of clumsy and incompetent Power-Ranger villains, who are viewed with a sort of comic affection by the fans (I mean, a handful of robots in the show existed solely for that purpose, but this is certainly not true of Megatron or any of the high-ranking Decepticon officers). In the early Transformers animated series, the Decepticons were composed mostly of the mindlessly loyal and those too stupid and weak to do any better, but as the series progressed, and especially when it continued with the Beast Wars series, it became apparent that no such love existed amongst the Decepticons and their leader, but rather a mutual, suspended hatred. This is especially true of the relationship between Megatron and his first officer Starscream (or of Megatron and Taranchelus in the Beast Wars series). It quickly became clear that Megatron ruled through fear and power, and that most of his underlings, if given the chance, would desert or rebel (that Starscream in particular would kill him and take his throne at the first opportunity has been obvious from the pilot episode).

The nature of Evil here became very obvious to me: Good, on the one hand, could exist for its own sake, was an end in itself, and could be practiced as a “positive” of sorts. Evil, however, was not something like this, was not something in-itself, but rather the absence of Good, a true “negative.” Thus, Evil is really a nothingness, and if pursued to its fullest, leads down a nihilistic path which ends in oblivion. CS Lewis, in his marvelous short, The Great Divorce notices that all the Evil in the universe, taken together, could not equal “one atom of Good,” because of the smallness of Evil, because of its literal negative nature.

What does this mean for Megatron? For Prime, by contrast, his goodness meant the loyalty and unconditional love of his follows and friends: a uniting of all those around him in a unity that transcended individual smallness. For Megatron, this is the opposite: in his extreme self-focus, he pushes all others away in the paranoia and ruthlessness necessary for ruling and in that, finds a solitude from which he cannot, ultimately, escape from. Like the old motif of the snake with its tail in its mouth, evil consumes itself in the attempt to pursue its ends, and meets the abyss in a kind of soundless petering out, alone, miserable, and damned.